Imagine that, within your group, you’re in a position where everyone wants to please you and no one can afford to challenge you. What does this mean for your behavior? It means you get to act selfish—focusing on what makes you most pleased, and becoming less sensitive to lower-grade pleasure stimuli.
This is not particularly accurate, or, more precisely, I’d like to see evidence that this is how people act. The president of the US, for example, cannot act strictly selfishly. Kings of old generally couldn’t either—they had nobles to keep happy and so forth. While there are cases where selfishness is an option because of high status, there are many cases where people prevent themselves from being successful because they are selfish. Indeed, there are many people who are unsuccessful because they are particularly disagreeable—they’d need to be high status to get away with their behaviour, and they’re not, so they don’t. Thus, merely observing that someone is selfish is, in a Bayesian sense, not even necessarily evidence that they are high status.
This post is yet further evidence that one should approach any status-based explanation with extreme skepticism. Saying that “Standing up straight is low status” seems completely wrong to me. I coach collegiate public speaking competitions, and having erect posture contributes very heavily to one’s presence. Standing up straight is something naturally done by confident, successful people, in my experience, and thus signals status. Likewise, slouching or trying to appear small seems like a logically low-status thing, as you are trying to prevent yourself from looking like a threat. Similarly, blowing your nose in a group of people seems like something the extremely socially awkward (or elderly) would do. Some high-status people could get away with it, but they’d be high status despite, not because of this activity.
The correct way to establish X as a high status activity would be, it seems, to show that, “If you take 1000 people who do X, Y are high status.” The higher Y, the more X shows status. Obviously this is rough, but the point is you can’t do it a priori; saying “X is high status” should reliably predict something about people who do X.
I’m sympathetic to your skepticism. A couple things, though. Public speaking competitions probably aren’t the best contexts to gather evidence on this because the competition format dictates so much status. The competitors, at least in this domain, are almost always lower status than the judges. The whole point is to get the judges to like them and their speech, obviously a competitor signaling higher status than the judge isn’t going to succeed. But I was involved in high school debate where status between debaters was routinely signaled by one debater treating the other informally and this included a relaxed posture. When interacting the the judges, however, behavior was more formal and the debaters would stand at attention (which is what I think the OP really means by stand straight). That said, the posture thing isn’t the best signal because standing straight also tends to indicate higher socio-economic class, which in most domains is a high-status property.
Some high-status people could get away with it, but they’d be high status despite, not because of this activity.
But it still signals status because everyone who didn’t know you were high-status before know sees that you’re high-status enough to get away with blowing your nose in public. It is getting away with these things that is high status, not just doing them.
It is getting away with these things that is high status, not just doing them.
It is actually only getting away with them that is high status. Doing them is not high status.
As far as public speaking, while most of what I’ve done involves coaching competitions, the basic principle of standing up straight corresponding to confidence applies across a broad spectrum. It is not always the case, as there are times when slouching may indicate relaxation or boredom, and relaxation or boredom may signal high status (for example, being the only person in a group who is not stressed out about an upcoming event may signal high ability, which is high-status). Thus, the claim that standing up straight is a low-status thing to do is simply false, as there are many, many occasions when it signals high status.
Standing at attention is another matter; if that is what the original author meant, they should have been clearer.
It is actually only getting away with them that is high status. Doing them is not high status.
Doing them is inferential evidence that he or she has not suffered sanctions for taking similar actions in the past or, having been sanctioned, they have the emotional physical resilience to be unaffected by said sanctions. Both of these predict higher status.
Evidence? There are plenty of low-status people with bad manners or bad posture. What data do you have that leads you to believe that, for some X under discussion here, on observing X, you can systematically infer the doer of X is high status?
More precisely, not suffering sanctions and emotional resilience may predict higher status, but does the behaviour under discussion reliably predict those characteristics, or may it predict others? You ignore the fact that if you display low-status behaviour at a social gathering, people won’t kill you and your offspring; you just won’t get invited back. Thus, people can quite easily repeatedly take actions that lower their status. This is even more so the case if they are somewhat oblivious to social rules, and, of course, being oblivious to social rules makes them far more likely to act “selfishly” (as used by the original author) in the first place.
I believe you need to observe a rather complicated series of events to infer that any particular selfish behaviour shows high-status. This makes the concept advocated by the post’s author rather useless: selfishness signals high status, except when it doesn’t, which is quite frequent and hard to identify precisely.
The behavior of humans provides information about their experiences and their social influences. This being the case I reject your correction and in particular the emphasis on the absolute, ‘only’.
It is getting away with these things that is high status, not just doing them.
The concerns I have with the public speaking competition evidence may be generalizable across a broad spectrum as well.
Standing straight corresponds to confidence in interactions with superiors because the status-acceptable alternative is leaning forward and keeping one’s head down. In say, job interviews, if an interviewee leans back he/she is viewed as not caring enough or unprofessional (and I think this is because their posture is indicating they don’t recognize the authority of the interviewer). Standing straight is the appropriate posture for an interviewee that wants to demonstrate confidence and appreciation of authority. But the interviewer can easily get away with leaning back in his/her chair and in interactions with equals this demonstrates confidence.
I rather explicitly avoid disputing this. There are times when slouching signals high status. There are times when it signals low status. There are times when it signals nothing. The original poster’s claim was that standing up straight signals low status; this claim was made in an unqualified way. Since there are many cases where this is false, his claim is incorrect. In particular, the fact that people often reflect their status in their posture—i.e. people who are presently successful/high-status reflect that by standing up straight and taking up more space—is a serious problem for the original poster’s claim. The fact that cases exist where slouching signals status is largely irrelevant; the original poster’s claim was that standing up straight is principally a sign of low status. This is false, because it is also (indeed, I would argue, normally) a signal of high status.
That’s right. Imagine if one of the debaters didn’t even care or react to what the other was saying. That’s a textbook high status move. The fact that the two are engaged in a debate, already puts them both in the same tier of status, with the winner of the “debate” going slightly higher.
You’re just moving the goalposts. The problem is that there are many, many high status people who cannot or do not behave like this, and there are many low-status people who can and do behave like this.
The main problem is that “high-status” does not carve out the space you are describing. It describes someone with a lot of power. This is purely situational and may or may not coincide with high status. The only electrician in a small town can get away with saying or doing all kinds of things that other people can’t. Likewise the African strongman, or the schoolteacher, or the government bureaucrat. Power is the determinant here, not status. Selfishness signals power, which may or may not signal status.
The other problem is that, once someone’s status is low enough, their behaviour may be incapable of influencing it, so they may behave selfishly because they have basically nothing to lose.
At this point, I’d also throw in that you really haven’t defined what you mean by “selfish” and what constitutes “getting away with it,” both of which would probably help. This whole post is riddled with vagueness, and I think that vagueness helps to either mask the lack of a point, or to distract from an actual good point you have not made.
This is not particularly accurate, or, more precisely, I’d like to see evidence that this is how people act. The president of the US, for example, cannot act strictly selfishly. Kings of old generally couldn’t either—they had nobles to keep happy and so forth. While there are cases where selfishness is an option because of high status, there are many cases where people prevent themselves from being successful because they are selfish. Indeed, there are many people who are unsuccessful because they are particularly disagreeable—they’d need to be high status to get away with their behaviour, and they’re not, so they don’t. Thus, merely observing that someone is selfish is, in a Bayesian sense, not even necessarily evidence that they are high status.
This post is yet further evidence that one should approach any status-based explanation with extreme skepticism. Saying that “Standing up straight is low status” seems completely wrong to me. I coach collegiate public speaking competitions, and having erect posture contributes very heavily to one’s presence. Standing up straight is something naturally done by confident, successful people, in my experience, and thus signals status. Likewise, slouching or trying to appear small seems like a logically low-status thing, as you are trying to prevent yourself from looking like a threat. Similarly, blowing your nose in a group of people seems like something the extremely socially awkward (or elderly) would do. Some high-status people could get away with it, but they’d be high status despite, not because of this activity.
The correct way to establish X as a high status activity would be, it seems, to show that, “If you take 1000 people who do X, Y are high status.” The higher Y, the more X shows status. Obviously this is rough, but the point is you can’t do it a priori; saying “X is high status” should reliably predict something about people who do X.
I’m sympathetic to your skepticism. A couple things, though. Public speaking competitions probably aren’t the best contexts to gather evidence on this because the competition format dictates so much status. The competitors, at least in this domain, are almost always lower status than the judges. The whole point is to get the judges to like them and their speech, obviously a competitor signaling higher status than the judge isn’t going to succeed. But I was involved in high school debate where status between debaters was routinely signaled by one debater treating the other informally and this included a relaxed posture. When interacting the the judges, however, behavior was more formal and the debaters would stand at attention (which is what I think the OP really means by stand straight). That said, the posture thing isn’t the best signal because standing straight also tends to indicate higher socio-economic class, which in most domains is a high-status property.
But it still signals status because everyone who didn’t know you were high-status before know sees that you’re high-status enough to get away with blowing your nose in public. It is getting away with these things that is high status, not just doing them.
It is actually only getting away with them that is high status. Doing them is not high status.
As far as public speaking, while most of what I’ve done involves coaching competitions, the basic principle of standing up straight corresponding to confidence applies across a broad spectrum. It is not always the case, as there are times when slouching may indicate relaxation or boredom, and relaxation or boredom may signal high status (for example, being the only person in a group who is not stressed out about an upcoming event may signal high ability, which is high-status). Thus, the claim that standing up straight is a low-status thing to do is simply false, as there are many, many occasions when it signals high status.
Standing at attention is another matter; if that is what the original author meant, they should have been clearer.
Doing them is inferential evidence that he or she has not suffered sanctions for taking similar actions in the past or, having been sanctioned, they have the emotional physical resilience to be unaffected by said sanctions. Both of these predict higher status.
Evidence? There are plenty of low-status people with bad manners or bad posture. What data do you have that leads you to believe that, for some X under discussion here, on observing X, you can systematically infer the doer of X is high status?
More precisely, not suffering sanctions and emotional resilience may predict higher status, but does the behaviour under discussion reliably predict those characteristics, or may it predict others? You ignore the fact that if you display low-status behaviour at a social gathering, people won’t kill you and your offspring; you just won’t get invited back. Thus, people can quite easily repeatedly take actions that lower their status. This is even more so the case if they are somewhat oblivious to social rules, and, of course, being oblivious to social rules makes them far more likely to act “selfishly” (as used by the original author) in the first place.
I believe you need to observe a rather complicated series of events to infer that any particular selfish behaviour shows high-status. This makes the concept advocated by the post’s author rather useless: selfishness signals high status, except when it doesn’t, which is quite frequent and hard to identify precisely.
The behavior of humans provides information about their experiences and their social influences. This being the case I reject your correction and in particular the emphasis on the absolute, ‘only’.
Jack said it well.
The concerns I have with the public speaking competition evidence may be generalizable across a broad spectrum as well.
Standing straight corresponds to confidence in interactions with superiors because the status-acceptable alternative is leaning forward and keeping one’s head down. In say, job interviews, if an interviewee leans back he/she is viewed as not caring enough or unprofessional (and I think this is because their posture is indicating they don’t recognize the authority of the interviewer). Standing straight is the appropriate posture for an interviewee that wants to demonstrate confidence and appreciation of authority. But the interviewer can easily get away with leaning back in his/her chair and in interactions with equals this demonstrates confidence.
I rather explicitly avoid disputing this. There are times when slouching signals high status. There are times when it signals low status. There are times when it signals nothing. The original poster’s claim was that standing up straight signals low status; this claim was made in an unqualified way. Since there are many cases where this is false, his claim is incorrect. In particular, the fact that people often reflect their status in their posture—i.e. people who are presently successful/high-status reflect that by standing up straight and taking up more space—is a serious problem for the original poster’s claim. The fact that cases exist where slouching signals status is largely irrelevant; the original poster’s claim was that standing up straight is principally a sign of low status. This is false, because it is also (indeed, I would argue, normally) a signal of high status.
That’s right. Imagine if one of the debaters didn’t even care or react to what the other was saying. That’s a textbook high status move. The fact that the two are engaged in a debate, already puts them both in the same tier of status, with the winner of the “debate” going slightly higher.
Actually, the biggest status move I can recall was using your opponent’s first name.
President of the US is not an instance of the category I was describing. Think African strongman.
You’re just moving the goalposts. The problem is that there are many, many high status people who cannot or do not behave like this, and there are many low-status people who can and do behave like this.
The main problem is that “high-status” does not carve out the space you are describing. It describes someone with a lot of power. This is purely situational and may or may not coincide with high status. The only electrician in a small town can get away with saying or doing all kinds of things that other people can’t. Likewise the African strongman, or the schoolteacher, or the government bureaucrat. Power is the determinant here, not status. Selfishness signals power, which may or may not signal status.
The other problem is that, once someone’s status is low enough, their behaviour may be incapable of influencing it, so they may behave selfishly because they have basically nothing to lose.
At this point, I’d also throw in that you really haven’t defined what you mean by “selfish” and what constitutes “getting away with it,” both of which would probably help. This whole post is riddled with vagueness, and I think that vagueness helps to either mask the lack of a point, or to distract from an actual good point you have not made.